A Study on Simulation Software for Cloud Computing and its Applications

Currently, cloud environments are making use of virtualization technologies. Instead of running programs on computers, everything is hosted in the cloud. The latter is a model enabling an on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (storage, applications, services, etc.). It offers services that can be classified in three categories: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). These tools may include the different algorithms used by different service providers. This paper presents a survey of the existing simulation tools in cloud computing. It provides also a critical and comparative analysis of the studied tools. Finally, it stands out a major challenge to be addressed for further research.